Keeping the Balance
by fagur fiskur
Summary: "Of course there was a line that was not to be crossed. On the rare occasion that one of us did, we could not mention it for years, for fear of upsetting the balance." Kirk and Spock Prime talk. Gen, but implied Kirk Prime/Spock Prime


**A/N:** I was in a peculiar mood yesterday and wrote this. Enjoy!

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><p><strong>Keeping the Balance<strong>

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><p>"It was a delicate situation."<p>

Kirk raises an eyebrow. Or tries to. It feels like maybe one of them went higher than the other, but as he's not standing in front of a mirror, he can't be sure.

"Delicate?" He repeats. "A century later and you're still waxing poetry about the guy. That doesn't sound very delicate to me."

Ambassador Spock looks up from his cup of tea and raises a single eyebrow perfectly. The bastard. "We grew out of it, of course. We were young, then."

"Older than I am now," Kirk points out, because he's kind of a brat like that. "He became Captain when he was thirty, right?"

"Thirty-one," Spock corrects him.

Kirk tries not to look too smug. "Right. And you became his first officer."

"And you are wondering how we settled into our working relationship," Spock concludes, but it's not really all that impressive considering he's just repeating word for word what Kirk asked him a few minutes earlier.

"I just..." Kirk scratches the back of his head, wondering how he can possibly word this without offending the Ambassador. "Me and my Spock aren't. At all. I'm... he's... were you as irritating back then as he is now?"

Despite the insult (_'nice going, Kirk'_), Spock's lips merely twitch at the corners. "I assume that you are having difficulties with my counterpart."

Kirk bites his lip to refrain from a sarcastic remark. "We clash," he settles on. "It's like we don't see eye to eye on anything. It's very frustrating. We made such a good team during the Narada crisis, but since then we just... don't."

Spock calmly takes a sip from his tea. "You cannot expect to automatically fall into the right pattern. It is different during a crisis; you act on instinct. The mundane requires far more thought and planning. It is fortunate that you and Spock work well together on an instinctive level but for that to translate to an intellectual level, you must learn to communicate."

Kirk grimaces. Trying to communicate with the younger Spock is kind of like talking to a brick wall. "Is that what you did?"

"For the most part, yes." Spock takes another sip of his tea. "But as I stated previously, it was a delicate situation."

"So there's more to it?"

Spock's eyes do that thing where they look like he's smiling while the rest of his face stays still. "Our working relationship was quite smooth. It was only when we failed to separate the professional from the personal that we slipped up."

Now Kirk's curious. He knows he shouldn't, that he probably won't get anything out of it anyway, but he's really got to ask. "You mean when your feelings got involved?"

Spock hesitates briefly. "I did not like to admit it then," he finally says, which is as good as affirmative.

"What exactly do you mean by delicate situation?" And now the words are just coming out before Kirk's even got a chance to think about them. But. He's _really_ curious and Spock is just so damn _mysterious_, damn him, it's like there's a double meaning to everything he says. Even to this. Especially to this.

"Have I not already explained it?" Spock asks, which really should be Kirk's cue to drop this. But then, he's never been too good at taking hints.

"Yeah, but there's more to it than that." _There has to be_. "Right?"

Spock looks into his tea cup, grasping it with both hands and softly stroking it with his left thumb. He's got really big hands, Kirk notes, even if they look fragile in their old age.

"We were good friends, which was in on itself unusual enough. At that age I had not yet allowed myself to form close personal connections."

"So what made him different?"

Spock looks up. There's something about the way he looks at Kirk that makes the young Captain feel special. It's an oddly heavy feeling but Kirk likes it all the same.

"Jim Kirk has always been unique," Spock says eventually, making Kirk blush and _dammit why is he blushing_. "I knew that from the first moment I met him."

Kirk clears his throat, feeling his face heat up further, even if he knows Spock isn't actually talking about _him_. Just another person who happened to share Kirk's name and DNA.

"There was an ease to our relationship that I felt was rather surprising," Spock admits. "I even found myself engaging it utterly meaningless banter with him on occasion. Something I had not thought myself capable of." He takes another sip of his tea. "Of course there was a line that was not to be crossed. On the rare occasion that one of us did, we could not mention it for years, for fear of upsetting the balance."

Kirk fidgets. He wants to keep asking but there's something stopping him. Like if he does, _he'd_ be crossing some invisible line.

"As I said," Spock finishes, putting the tea cup away, "it was a delicate situation."


End file.
